Perry

Hewitt

Tag: audio

Friday 5 — 9.9.2016
1. I hope you spent a good bit of summer staring at the sun-soaked scenery rather than a screen. Product Hunt can catch you up on what you’ve missed, with the 44 most loved products of the summer. Try Duolingo Tinycards for learning made fun, Snappa for crafting great graphics easily, or Great Apps Timeline for a nostalgic look at popular apps’ visual evolution.
2. Mobile-first design is not mobile-only, according to a study from Nielsen Norman Group. Designing solely for mobile can result in reduced utility of desktop navigation.
3. To gain adoption, digital experiences must be friction-free — just make it easy. KissMetrics offers tips on what easy should look like when you scan, interact with, load, share, and monetize digital products.
4. Here’s everything you ever wanted to know about Facebook privacy settings in one long infographic.
5. If you design digital products for users under 25, there’s lots of breathless, anecdata-laden commentary to wade through. Read these two solid exceptions: the social media lives of teens in Like. Flirt. Ghost., and this comprehensive look at the motivations and behaviors of frugal, brand-wary Generation Z.
Weekend fun: Facebook celebrated #StarTrek50 with a profile photo swap and custom reactions. Naturally, NASA got in on the action along with the International Space Station and, inexplicably, Orville Redenbacher.

Every Friday, find five, highly subjective pointers to compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally. Try out the Friday 5 archive, or sign up for a weekly email.
September 9, 2016
Friday 5 — 6.24.2016
1. Slack has launched Buttons to ensure you never leave, advancing the platform from a discrete messaging app to a productive work hub. Now you can pay back a colleague, resolve a tech alert, update a project management task all from within Slack, thanks to some new APIs.
2. Is podcasting today following the same, inevitable trajectory as blogging back in 2004? Ben Thompson dives into the podcasting monetization challenge.
3. Scott Belsky explains why you should focus on the first mile of product experience: elements like the welcome/tour, the onboarding, the explanatory copy, and the defaults. Over time, product teams tend to optimize for existing users, when they should be continuously improving the 15 seconds of the user experience for new users.
4. The latest Pew report on social media in the workplace finds that 34% of Americans use social media to take a mental break while at work, while only 20% use it for information to help solve work-related problems. Surprising to me: a full 25% of Americans don’t use the internet at work in any capacity.
5. Should your brand be on Snapchat? Trackmaven’s useful Snapchat marketing guide [registration required] offers a step-by-step how-to for marketers.
Weekend fun: If your definition of “fun” extends to “mildly terrifying,” don’t miss Boston Dynamics’ latest video featuring Spot, a new mini robot that can toss a soda can in the trash even if it struggles with hardwood flooring. On a lighter note, take a cool, geeky break with some liquid nitrogen tossed on a lock, a rose, a watermelon, and even bare skin.

Every Friday, find five, highly subjective pointers to compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally. Try out the Friday 5 archive, or sign up for a weekly email.
June 24, 2016
Friday 5 — 12.4.2015
1. Nike shoes, Star Wars droids, and hoverboards were among the popular products shopped for on Black Friday. If you were shopping from the comfort of your couch, you were in good company: Smartphone sales nearly doubled year over year, from 9.1% to 15.2 %. Read the full report [PDF], and ignore Wired’s snark that Cyber Monday is over.
2. In recent years LinkedIn has evolved from a static resume site to an active publishing platform, but the mobile app experience has consistently lagged. This week’s clean app redesign reflects an effort to make up for lost time, but the level of noise for users remains a challenge.
3. GE’s branded content podcast, The Message, hit #1 in iTunes. NiemanLab reports on the savvy partnership and light touch that led to popular success, as well as the challenges of branded content in podcasting.
4. As mobile becomes central to digital strategy, the importance of decidedly unglamorous testing comes to the fore. Read this handy guide to painless mobile testing for a nuts and bolts approach to getting the job done.
5. If the internet is addictive, should we regulate it? This essay points out that while we acknowledge the internet’s appeal, we put the responsibility for regulation on the users, rather than the tech companies. We are notoriously poor at estimating our smartphone use — recent research found some young adults checked their smartphones 85 times a day, roughly double the amount they estimated.
Weekend fun: If you had doubts about the internet’s ability to transform society, look no further than the trend of babies named after Instagram filters. But the absurd is not limited to the digital: to celebrate theMonty Python reunion, the Brits have put a giant dead parrot in Potters Field Park. (Original sketch, for reference.)

Every Friday, find five, highly subjective pointers to compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally. Try out the Friday 5 archive, or sign up for a weekly email.
December 4, 2015
Friday 5 — 5.22.2015
1. For those of you already planning your Memorial Day driving routes, Google Maps has released useful, new features alerting users to delays and detours as you enter your destination. Beyond the time estimate, new cards provide additional context about potential delays. Related trivia: Google Maps also released the top destinations from Memorial Day 2014.
2. Google is once again showing tweets in search results, starting with mobile. Now you can search for topics and hashtags directly within Google. At the same time, Twitter is rolling out its own more robust search, with new features for logged-out users. My guess is that Twitter native search will cater more to live Twitter consumption of breaking news or events.
3. More than just music — everyone’s favorite social playlist subscription service Spotify is diversifying into podcasts and programming.
4. Today’s workforce spans multiple generations, new economy and old economy roles, and various degrees of digital capability. Here’s why the expertise gap matters, and why the first step is acknowledging the problem.
5. The MOOC (Massively Open Online Course) hype cycle peaked in 2012, but educators are still trying to crack the right formula for effective, online learning. Read this explanation of why primacy of location and cost still matters to motivate learners in a world outside the autodidacts of Silicon Valley.
Weekend fun: It’s the long weekend — why not let loose with some street dancing to beatboxers. Bad weather where you are? Then pore through these examples of faux code in TV and movies.

Every Friday, find five, highly subjective pointers to compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally. Try out the Friday 5 archive, or sign up for a weekly email.
May 22, 2015
Friday 5 — 10.17.2014
1. Twitter has enabled streaming audio to a limited number of partners via Audio Cards using Soundcloud. Now users can listen, like and share audio content on SoundCloud without leaving Twitter. This feature will be big for music, and useful for finding new audiences for public radio programming. Audio excerpts might also serve up interesting teasers for online learning content.
2. With stickers in comments and the ability to draw on photos in Messenger, Facebook got a lot more visual and fun this week.
3. Facebook is for the olds, while Spotify, Quora, and Instagram topped this list of digital products teens use and love. Product Hunt this week featured products made by teens.
4. Data security has everyone spooked, and rightfully so. Do your part by reading this handy guide to not being that idiot who got the company hacked. TL;DR: two-factor authentication for everything.
5. How do organizations that adopt and advance by new technology effectively drive digital transformation? According to this HBR post, it’s not an impossible task or arcane art — the main requirements are time, tenacity, and leadership.
Weekend fun: Remember that McSweeney’s piece and subsequent video mocking 1990s feel-good font Comic Sans? Now someone’s made a typewriter called the Sincerity Machine that produces nothing but.

Every Friday, find five, highly subjective pointers to compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally. Try out the Friday 5 archive, or sign up for a weekly email.
October 17, 2014
Friday 5 — 2.7.2014
1. Is your app addictive enough to make money? Eric Reiss lists eighteen elements to consider when gauging your app’s ability to engage and retain users.
2. If you’re trying to see what an addictive app looks like, you could do a lot worse than Flappy Bird. This difficult game manages somehow to infuriate and retain users, raking in $50K in revenue per day in the process.
3. QuizUp, the delightfully addictive and competitive quiz app, has launched an iPad edition. The additional real estate will be used to surface more navigational elements, particularly those that drive social engagement.
4. Maybe we’ll play games like QuizUp on our iPads, but have we by and large moved on from the tablet? This article posits that the pace of technology innovation is leaving tablets in the dust as phones become larger and, well, “phabulous.”
5. Internet audio still seems like an incredibly undervalued medium. Maybe PRX’s launch of Radiotopia, a new site that aggregates the best story-driven shows on the planet, will get more people tuned in and turned on to the possibilities.
Weekend fun: Is it binge-watching or bingewatching? Should Bitcoin be capitalized as a concept and lowercased as a currency, or vice versa? Can duckface truly be one word? If these kinds of questions keep you up at night, Buzzfeed’s excruciatingly correct style guide to the words we use today is well worth reading.

Every Friday, find five, highly subjective links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally.
February 7, 2014
Friday 5 — 12.20.2013
1. Mandatory reading for web design geeks: Snow fail: Do readers really prefer parallax design? New research poses good questions about user orientation to parallax scrolling, which may be better suited for content heavier on video and other visualizations rather than text.
2. NPR continues its leadership in forward-looking digital initiatives by securing $17M in grants. $10M will pay for the development of a new, presumably mobile-first platform to provide a personalized, location-based listening experience for content from NPR and affiliate stations.
3. Harvard’s Berkman Center published its annual compendium of essays in Internet Monitor 2013: Reflections on the Digital World. Sections include governments, companies, and citizens as actors in the digital world. Favorite excerpt: Potentially lost in the debates over privacy, security, and surveillance, is the fact that access to information plays a critical role in human development, governance, and economic growth across all sectors, including health, education, energy, agriculture, and transportation.
4. What’s App, a company of ~50 employees, is up to 400M users — and added 100M over the last four months alone. But how will all these social messaging apps make money? Some smart plays are emerging around e-commerce, with flash sales and sticker products driving revenue in Asia.
5. This terrific, long read outlines a step-by-step approach to digital marketing success. Written by digital marketing evangelist and bigtime analytics nerd Avinash Kaushik, the piece provides great guidance on how to focus your analytics efforts and avoid endless “data puke”.
Weekend fun: In case you’re suffering through an awkward office Christmas party or Yankee swap today, let me ratchet up your holiday envy: Bill Gates is an awesome Secret Santa.

Every Friday, find five, highly subjective links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally.
December 20, 2013
Try it: 3 ways to tell a story online

Compelling content is a differentiator in a world where everyone is an online publisher. That content can take entirely new forms: data visualization (like this recurring developments site from Beutler Ink) or inspired curation (like Brainpickings by Maria Popova). And of course multimedia plays an ever larger role in online storytelling. Last year’s groundbreaking New York Times feature on the avalanche at Tunnel Creek has even turned snow fall into a verb.

New apps and platforms are springing up to entice a wider range of people to try multimedia and interactive storytelling. Three to consider:

1. Storyteller
Last week Amazon released Storyteller, a quickly and easy way for writers to storyboard their scripts. The scripts have to be in Studios but the service, still in beta, is free (except for a 45-day option). This feels like a grown-up version of xtranormal, and a way for writers to more quickly envision the creative potential of a script. Best of all, you can use the tool to storyboard others’ scripts in a more public and collaborative environment.

2. Tapestry
When not ruining our lives with Dots, the people over at betaworks have been polishing version 2.0 of Tapestry. Tapestry is a mobile app aimed at beautiful, short-form storytelling. I gave it a try — the admin user experience is clean and simple on the admin side, and the consumer experience of tap to-advance on mobile is oddly addictive kind of like, well, Dots.

3. Zeega
Finally, more interesting developments in interactive storytelling over at Zeega. Originally a collaboration at Harvard, Zeega is now among the first cohort of media entrepreneurs over at Matter VC. The platform enables slick integration of audio and video, and has attracted a creative community masterful with found assets. There’s enough complexity to be able to create pieces for a recent exhibit at SFMOMA — but it’s also a way to have a lot of fun with your ABCs and the Jackson 5.

The most encouraging thing about all these apps is the way they are lowering the technical bar for creative storytelling online. It recalls how blogging liberated text publishing from the webmasters and multimillion dollar content management systems in the early 2000s. These are three to watch — and to try.

June 11, 2013
Listen up: how to advance an audio strategy
Audio is the perpetual bridesmaid at the multimedia wedding celebrated on the web today. That’s not to say people haven’t long recognized the value of audio files distributed over the internet. Major milestones include the creation of PRX and the mainstreaming of podcasting, the iTunes store (now 10 years old with 50 billion downloads), and the relatively recent arrival of SoundCloud for more social and embeddable audio. But most people looking to create a comprehensive online presence don’t stop and ask “What’s my audio strategy?” They should, and here are three ways to do it.
1. Resist the knee-jerk, “let’s make a video” answer for content you want to call attention to. Remember that good video can be difficult to make — and that it requires great audio to be watchable. Evaluate your content resources (story, people, space, equipment) and decide whether audio may be the best fit. Pro-tip: if you do make a video, consider separating out the high-quality audio as a discrete asset, and make both available to your audience.
2. Consider audio less as a companion retelling of your text piece, and more as a way to add depth and color. Here’s an example of a Harvard Gazette article about Cambridge Phone-a Poem enlivened by one of the poems read by its author, Allen Ginsberg.
3. Remember that NPR’s oft-cited COPE model applies here: create and store your own audio, but publish it everywhere. Holy wars are regularly fought over the virtues of streaming versus downloading: enable both through as many platforms as feasible. The goal is to keep the content in a format that remains accessible as long as possible with minimal deprecation. Multiple custom players served only on your own website is pretty much the worst way to achieve that audio longevity.
Audio is too often an undersung web content hero beyond the context of radio online. Make sure it has a seat at the table as you plan your next online initiative.
May 28, 2013